Witcher 3 - Preview @ PC Gamer

There’s a creature in the woods slaughtering villagers. The elders want to appease the gods in the hope that it will move on. The leader of the village’s young upstarts disagrees, and wants you – a professional monster slayer – to bring him the beast’s head for a bag of gold. What do you do?

The best fantasy RPGs serve up the juiciest dilemmas, and the Witcher series has form for throwing up quality let’smake- a-cuppa-and-think conundrums. Slaying the monster seems like the obvious option here, but if The Witcher 3 is anything like its predecessors things are going to get complicated fast.

The hands-off demo I saw was being controlled by CD Projekt Red. For the first time in the series, the game lets players potter about an open world full of incidental missions like this. The devs could just as easily steer Geralt elsewhere and go exploring, but they opt to side with the youngster and venture into the woods, using Geralt’s ‘Witcher sense’ to find the monster. A dull red haze highlights important clues in the environment, some scratch marks here, some tracks there. Geralt soon concludes that the boogeyman is a Leshen – a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power.

Okay and then you kill "a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power". And then you wander around a bit and again you kill "a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power". Then you return to the village for a beer and some sluts, but again you have to kill "a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power". After the brawl in a local tavern and knifethrowing games, hell again you have to kill "a spooky, antlered humanoid of great power". Will it already die for good!?

Oh, sorry, I've misread something in the article… This ain't another Bethesda game.

While I have no love for grinding, I disagree with Joxer about Bethesda respawns being grinding (for me it just makes for a "living" world) and would welcome a similar but not so predictable respawn system in Witcher 3. Imho, it's only grinding if the game practically requires it for progression.

Plan didn't go as expected. Geralt is trapped in Hell and tortured / skinflayed by demons day in day out. Crap.

So the player comes in - as any Witcher2 NPC but now playable since Geralt is gone - and is given a mission to save Geralt or leave him rot in Hell and get some fantasy chicks into the finest fantasy Jacuzzi, get a lot of booze and smokes and HAVE A GOOD TIME!

Originally Posted by SonOfCapiz
While I have no love for grinding, I disagree with Joxer about Bethesda respawns being grinding (for me it just makes for a "living" world) and would welcome a similar but not so predictable respawn system in Witcher 3. Imho, it's only grinding if the game practically requires it for progression.

Yep, I just fast travel around them when I don't want to deal with them. Problem solved. Other unmentionable games don't give you that option…

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Yep, I just fast travel around them when I don't want to deal with them. Problem solved. Other unmentionable games don't give you that option…

I don't fast travel as I enjoy the sights of manual travel (which would be boring and empty without respawns) but anyway it's easy enough to avoid encounters you don't want by taking a little detour. As for the interiors, without respawns there's no reason to visit them again anyway so they're as grind-y or not as the player chooses them to be.

Originally Posted by sakichop
Please don't encouraged him, Am I the only one getting tired of his shtick?

I respect his right to dislike Bethesda, grinders, respawns, mobile games, well pretty much anything but do we need it posted in every thread no matter what the topic?

I mean he bashed Bethesda in a printer thread the other day. We all dislike stuff about gaming but I can't think of another member who spams almost every thread with it.

It's too bad too because he has demonstrated in the past that he is actually pretty knowledgeable about games and can contribute positively when he wants too.

Sorry, I don't mean to be too harsh , joxer seems to be a good guy but please give it a rest already.

What do you mean? I did a lookup and joxer has only bashed Bethesda or its games in 224 threads. 97 of them had nothing about Bethesda in the thread before his post. He is obsessed with Bethesda like Hitler was with the Jews. I'd post something positive about Bethesda every time joxer posts something negative, but I actually have a life and can't be bothered

Here's a great idea for anyone who gets under your skin. Click on the Forums heading up top. Choose User CP. Go to Edit Options, then scroll down to Edit ignore list, add the name of the offender (crpgnut) to the list. You will never see another post from this person, you'll just get a little blurb that says "_____ is on your ignore list" It's great! I added somebody called Villain Idiot or something like that and never see anything they write I don't even know if they still visit the site!

I like joxer - and I would never try to enforce anything just because he has an obsession with Skyrim. It's not a crime to be autistic - nor should it be

Ignore would seem to be the solution - if it's that big a deal. Personally, I just have a bit of fun with it. The more he repeats himself - the less effective the criticism becomes, because fanatics have never been very convincing in the long run.

People have told him he's annoying in that way for months now - and it's obvious that only fuels the fire.

We all have our pet peeves - and Rune never misses a chance to support the big mainstream games and bash people who don't enjoy the whole streamlining concept - for instance